Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
As per Comscore Facebook is now the fourth largest site in the world as measured by monthly page views.
Amongst the cognescenti the fashion du jour seems to be to talk Facebook down. All the time I am hearing stories from people who are using Facebook less. Yet the stats don’t lie (or at least not [...]
From the ever brilliant Marc Andreessen:
companies simply develop faster these days than they did in the past. Microsoft and Oracle, for example, both needed 10 years of incredibly work to get to their IPOs (both founded in ‘76, IPO in ‘86), and they only had a few hundred employees each when they went public — [...]
I have been using the Flock 1.0 beta for a few days now and the People Sidebar feature has really got me hooked. The product is well hyped (Techcrunch 40 winner) and has lots of great features (review) - but the People Sidebar could have a significance which goes beyond this latest skirmish in [...]
This is from the comments on a Fake Steve Jobs post about two hedge funds apparently investing $500m in Facebook at the same $15bn valuation Microsoft just paid. (Thanks to Alan for the pointer.)
Picture this: Zuckerberg’s got a big fish on the line for real money at a $15 Bill valuation. But is having trouble [...]
There are two big takeaways for me from the Virtual Worlds Forum conference I have been attending for the last couple of days.
The first is a firming up of a conclusion that I have been coming too for a while - there is huge opportunity at the nexus of virtual worlds, games (probably casual) and [...]
From Lord Putnam’s keynote address at the Virtual Worlds Forum in Kings Cross, London which is going on over the next couple of days:
“people are saying World of Warcraft is the new golf for technology focused networkers”
I love it. The parallels are legion – the addiction, the time away from the family, the incomprehensibility [...]
In the 1960s William Condon extensively researched the non-verbal interaction which surrounds speech. Beyond the obvious body language of looking into people’s eyes and hand movements it turns out there is a world of tiny interactions that happen at incredibly high speed. He wrote:
Your body’s locked precisely with your speech. You can’t break [...]
The following post has been sitting in draft form since Seedcamp week in early September. I have tried to pick out the key insights from a couple of panels/presentations where people discussed product - they were mostly thinking about consumer internet.
These points are in no particular order.
If you are building something you would use yourself [...]
Forget $10bn - Lee Lorenzen thinks Facebook will be worth $100bn. Whilst I wouldn’t go that far his arguments are not entirely crackers - although they do have one flaw that I will come to at the end of this post.
Lee Lorenzen has set up a venture fund, Altura Ventures, where the “whole portfolio will [...]
Up until now I have thought that CPMs on social networks are low mostly because people are familiar with the layout of pages and their eyes immediately go to the content that they want. In other words ad-blindness is particularly acute.
I still think that is a large part of the explanation, but the fact that [...]
